September 17, 2004

For No Reason

…except to show off my music collection. I won’t be happy until I own every piece of music that’s ever been recorded. I must be a materialist. Here’s what I come back to most often:

The Band- Music from Big Pink
Jimi Hendrix- Cry of Love
Devo- Duty Now for the Future
David Bowie- The Man Who Sold the World, Heroes
The Kinks- Village Green, Muswell Hillbillies
The Beatles, The White Album, everything
John Lennon- Plastic Ono Band
George Harrison- All Things Must Pass
Brian Eno- Before and After Science
Roxy Music- 1st album
Talking Heads- Remain in Light
Meat Puppets- Up on the Sun
Schubert- String Quintet
Beethoven- Grosse Fuge
Shostakovich- Quartets
Prokofiev- Piano Concertos
John Coltrane- Coltrane (1963)…
Duke Ellington- Money Jungle, Small Groups
Brahms- 3rd Symphony
Do Make Say Think- & Yet & Yet
Tortoise- TNT
Frank Zappa- Hot Rats
Wire- Chairs Missing
Neil Young- Harvest
Zombies-Odessey and Oracle
Bach- Goldberg Variations (Gould, second time)
Railroad Jerk- One Track Mind
Pavement- Wowee Zowee
GBV- Bee Thousand
3- Dark Days Coming
Thinking Fellers- Strangers from the Universe
Sebadoh- Bakesale
Lou Barlow- Winning Losers
Folk Implosion- Dare to be Surprised
Frank Black- Teenager of the Year
Stevie Wonder- Innervisions
Sly Stone- Riot
Bob Dylan- Blood on the Tracks, others
Dinosaur Jr.- Bug
Pink Floyd- Meddle, Animals
Mingus Plays Piano
David Byrne- Catherine Wheel
Per Ubu- Modern Dance
Nirvana- In Utero
NoMeansNo- Wrong
Stooges- Raw Power
Rolling Stones- Exile on Main Street, Satanic Majesties
Helium- The Dirt of Luck
Smog- Wild Love
Miles Davis- E.S.P.
Wayne Shorter- Soothsayer
Thelonious Monk- Criss Cross
Black Market Clash
Husker Du- New Day Rising
Polvo- Cor-crane Secret
Adrian Belew- Desire of the Rhino King
Neutral Milk Hotel- On Avery Island
XTC- English Settlement, Drums & Wires
Flaming Lips- Soft Bulletin
Grateful Dead- American Beauty
Velvet Underground- Not Nico
Beach Boys- Smile
Minutemen- Double Nickels
The Who- Tommy
Elvis Costello- Blood and Chocolate
Milk- So Many Dynamos
Nick Drake- Pink Moon
Lou Reed- Transformer
Sonic Youth- Sister
Elgar- Cello Concerto, Dupre
Debussy/Ravel Quartets
Arvo Part- Tabula Rasa

Mostly men, I realize. It’s what I am. Most of my favorite fiction writers are men as well, and American.

7 comments:

tequilita said...

isn't that funny? i love female artists, and i love male artists as well. i think most women like both. but i know so many men who have told me, "i dunno, i just am not as into female artists." ...strange phenomenon i've noticed. i have so many thoughts on why this is...maybe i'll post it. i'd be interested to hear yours. how come a story can be told (or sung) by a man or a woman and it seems most women are eager for it...but if a woman tells the story, many (not all) men aren't interested...until she proves to be something extraordinary, then she's got a shot. is it some kind of residual subconscious sexism still lurking in the cells of even the most otherwise egalitarian men?

Henry Baum said...

You could call it sexism if you like, but a lot of female songwriters seem obsessed with their own femininity--like Tori Amos or Sara Maclachlan. It doesn’t seem any better to me than music that celebrates its own masculinity, like bad heavy metal. A lot of great male songwriters exercise their female side, but the same is not always said of female songwriters.

I loved PJ Harvey’s first record "Dry" but after that she took herself WAY too seriously. The Breeders should have been up there, Throwing Muses. I won’t make a list by way of justifying myself. Female writers I like are Katherine Dunn or Joy Williams, writers that are somewhat masculine. I really don’t think this makes me sexist--any more than it makes me psychotically nationalist to like American writers. I just like artists coming from my point-of-view.

tequilita said...

i didn't mean to definitively label anything sexist, i just wonder sometimes if that's what it is. it's true that a lot of female artists focus (possibly excessively) on their femininity. and yeah, i don't think a lot of female's dig ultra-masculine artists either...i guess there's a continuum in there somewhere that levels the field. texas is a really good place to make some observations, a lot of artists starting out and you can watch public opinion form unaltered by too much media/commercialism. it's just an observation that it seems harder for females, i think there are a lot of reasons for it. just curious what you thought. thanks.

keed said...

i listen to a lot of music. male or female don't matter. when it comes to opera though i prefer female.

Henry Baum said...

Bob Marley- I don't really like reggae. Just not my thing.

Stevie Ray Vaughn- Seems to me like a white guy rip-off of Jimi Hendrix who plays bar music. I'll admit that I've only heard what they play on the radio.

Brubeck- I like him just fine but I don't come back to him over and over again like others.

Anonymous said...

Henry! I found you at last. You may or may not remember me from NYC in the late 90s. I was troubled and in trouble. Anyway, now I am director of the SC Book Festival. I was in the process of inviting a few Soft Skull poets, referred to me by folks entirely removed from Soft Skull. I may invite Todd Colby, but who knows. Are you still writing, and whatever came of OCG (still one of my favs--its been passed around here like a bottle of whiskey around a burning barrel)? If you are writing, maybe you'd like to come to the Book festival and do a reading...I pay for airline and hotel. You read here (Columbia,SC) at the so-called Art Bar. I think you liked it. Now I have a convention center and a hundred thou in the budget. And I still despise Tom 'ass samurai' Cruise...

heather_buggy@msn.com

Anonymous said...

nick drake is beyond amazing. i like knowing how people lived, or died. it makes their music, so much more, real.

xo. war.

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